Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  Although Cook’s voyages are celebrated primarily as spectacular feats of navigation, they produced much more than just knowledge of where the reefs and coastlines lay. In terms of our understanding of Polynesian history, they constitute a sort of opening gambit, the first serious attempt on the part of Europeans to examine Polynesian experience and knowledge, and the first significant interaction between European and Polynesian ideas. They are, of course, less satisfactory than one would wish. While it is fascinating to learn that no matter how far Tupaia got from Tahiti, he always knew exactly where it lay, it is frustrating to find that no one ever seems to have asked him how he knew this. And while it is useful to learn from Banks that on their “longer Voyages” the Tahitians steered “in the day by the Sun and in the night by the Stars,” it is disappointing to discover that no one ever got any details about how this was actually done.

  Still, what did emerge from these voyages was significant: first, the realization that all the islanders of the remote Pacific formed a single, identifiable cultural group and, second, the suggestion that they could be linked, linguistically at least, with people far to the west of them. Here, then, were the bones of a theory about who the Polynesians were. It was based on eyewitness observation and firsthand Polynesian accounts, along with a bit of clever thinking about linguistics, and it was a pretty solid piece of deduction—certainly much better than the notion that Polynesians had been created in their islands by God. But it was not by any stretch of the imagination complete. Over the course of the next hundred-odd years, all kinds of people would attempt to fill in the gaps, coming up with an array of hypothetical Polynesian histories—some clever, some not so clever, some downright wacky—even as Polynesia itself morphed under the pressure of contact with the outside world.

  Part III

  Why Not Just Ask Them?

  (1778–1920)

  In which we look at some of the stories that Polynesians told about themselves and consider the difficulty nineteenth-century Europeans had trying to make sense of them.

  Drowned Continents and Other Theories

  The Nineteenth-Century Pacific

  “Dupetit Thouars taking over Tahiti on September 9th, 1842” by Louis Le Breton, 1850.

  MUSÉE NATIONALE DE LA MARINE, PARIS. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

  IN THE REMOTE Pacific, the nineteenth century was the century when everything changed. With Cook’s death in Hawai‘i in 1778, the era of European discovery effectively drew to a close. The big geographic questions—the size of the ocean, the existence (or not) of a southern continent, the locations of the major archipelagoes—had all been answered, and this, along with improvements in maritime technology (notably the development of the chronometer, which finally enabled European navigators to find their way about the ocean with some precision), made the Pacific much more accessible to outsiders. The result was an influx of missionaries, whalers, traders, government officials, and settlers.

  The first mission ship bound for Polynesia set out from England in 1796, carrying thirty evangelical men and women. The initial ventures—to be distributed among three fledgling missions in Tonga, Tahiti, and the Marquesas—were not a success. Three of those sent to Tonga were killed in an outbreak of tribal war; all but one of the group stationed in Tahiti abandoned their posts; and of the two men sent to the Marquesas, one could not even be persuaded to go ashore. But the process of Christianization had begun, and within a matter of decades armies of Anglican, Wesleyan, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Catholic, and Mormon missionaries were fanning out across the region, catechisms in hand. It was also only a matter of time, once the geography of the great ocean was known and a few safe harbors identified, before the lure of trade would begin attracting commercial adventurers. The dream of Terra Australis Incognita, with its imagined hoard of silk, spices, and gold, was gone, but the Pacific offered a broad range of exploitable products: fur seals, sandalwood, flax, timber, pearl and turtle shell, bêche-de-mer, and, of course, that most lucrative and alluring of all the ocean’s resources: whales.

  The first whaling ships arrived in the Pacific hard on the heels of Captain Cook, and each year the numbers increased, so that by the mid-1840s as many as six or seven hundred vessels could be found cruising the Pacific at any time. Whalers carried crews of about thirty men and remained at sea for an average of three and a half years. Their routes, not so different from those of the early explorers, typically brought them into the Pacific by way of Cape Horn, where, during the southern summer months, they trolled the southeastern reaches of the ocean. At the end of the season they shifted north, and in between they called at islands in search of water, food, women, and supplies. At the height of the boom, in the 1830s and ’40s, this meant tens of thousands of men from all over the world—lascars, Spaniards, Native Americans, Brits, Balts, Russians, Scandinavians, Chinese—pouring into island ports in Polynesia. The major stops were Hawai‘i, the Marquesas, and New Zealand, but there were so many whalers in the Pacific during these decades that even small islands like Wallis and Rotuma had firsthand experience of their crews.

  All these people needed food, clothing, and entertainment, and they often had money in their pockets to spend. The result was a whole host of secondary industries—bakeries, blacksmiths, brothels, laundries, boardinghouses, grog sellers—which sprang up to cater to those passing through the major ports. These, in turn, became famously unruly places, and as the size and complexity of these settlements grew, the need for order became increasingly urgent. Before long there were signs of nascent government—consuls, harbormasters, jails—and by the middle of the nineteenth century several of the more populous Polynesian islands had come under some form of colonial control.

  The impact of all this on the islanders was dramatic, particularly in the places where foreigners were concentrated. Societies that had been shielded for centuries by distance and isolation were suddenly inundated with new influences. There were new trade goods like scissors, knives, and mirrors, new animals like horses, rabbits, and cats. There were new foods like flour, cabbage, and onions, new weeds like sow thistle, dandelion, and gorse. Stone adzes and clubs were replaced by guns and hatchets, digging sticks by shovels and hoes, clothing of plaited flax and beaten tapa by woolen blankets, jackets, trousers, and cotton frocks. There were new laws, new languages, and new religions, as well as new vices, like tobacco and drink. Polynesians became literate and, in some cases, well traveled and were exposed in large numbers to Old World pathogens for the first time.

  Meanwhile, back in Europe, the idea of Polynesia began surfacing in the popular culture. There had long been an armchair fascination with voyages: explorers’ accounts were a major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre, even spawning a new branch of literature—both Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) were fictional extrapolations of the genre of factual travel writing. At the same time, a new zeitgeist was emerging in Europe, one that privileged nature over culture, the past over the present, the far over the near. Folklore, previously of no real interest, suddenly became fascinating; foreign and archaic subjects assumed a new prestige, as did the histories of peoples outside the classical lineages of Greece and Rome.

  A list of literary touchstones from the period gives some indication of where things were going. In 1762, the poet James Macpherson published a fraudulent but wildly successful poem cycle purportedly based upon Scottish Gaelic folktales. In 1770, extracts of the Prose Edda—one of the primary sources of Norse mythology—appeared in English for the first time. In 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan,” a poem set in the summer palace of the Mongol emperor. In 1805, Walter Scott published the first of many historical romances set among the Scottish border clans. In 1812, the first collection of German fairy tales was published by the Brothers Grimm. In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans, a novel set at the edge of the American frontier.

  With the rise of Romanticism—which is the name we give to this cultural moment—Europe
ans seized on the Pacific as a fit setting, like the Orient or the colonial frontier, for quests and adventures. Poets like Keats and Coleridge incorporated references to the Pacific into their work; adventure stories began featuring cannibals and volcanoes; minor (and even major) characters in European novels lit out for the Pacific to make their fortunes or were sent there as punishment for their sins. The market for travelogues continued to flourish, but now, in addition to the journals of explorers like Cook, there were narratives by missionaries, traders, and colonial officials, who passed through the Pacific and wrote up their impressions for the benefit of curious readers back home.

  A handful of these writers would ultimately settle in the islands, learn Polynesian languages, and make what could be fairly called a study of Polynesian ideas. They would collect and translate Polynesian histories, interpret Polynesian myths, compare Polynesian names and languages, and, out of all this, produce influential theories about the origins and history of the Polynesian people. But even those with no more than a cursory understanding of the region took up the vexed question of where Polynesians had come from. And so, in the nineteenth century, we see a proliferation of theories—which both helped to define the problem of Polynesian origins and, at the same time, introduced a number of wayward ideas.

  COOK AND HIS companions had arrived, toward the end of the eighteenth century, at what we might call a “baseline” explanation. On the strength of what they had been able to observe, as well as what had been told to them by islanders, they concluded that the inhabitants of the remote Pacific had probably island-hopped their way across the ocean, starting somewhere in Southeast Asia. Cook, true to his calling, had arrived at this position by considering the possibilities conceived as a series of cardinal points. He did not believe that the inhabitants of Polynesia had come from the east (that is, the Americas), and, as to the north and south, experience had taught him that there was no undiscovered continent or hidden homeland in either the far northern or southern reaches of the ocean. West, however, seemed like a good possibility, especially given what he had learned from Tupaia. “For,” he wrote, “if the inhabitants of [the Society Islands] have been at Islands laying 2 or 300 Leagues to the westward of them,” as Tupaia had reported, “it cannot be doubted but that the inhabitants of those western Islands may have been at others as far to the westward of them and so we may trace them from Island to Island quite to the East Indias.”

  It was a well-reasoned argument, but it left a number of important questions unanswered, foremost among them the problem of the prevailing winds. The same winds that had swept European navigators westward across the middle of the Pacific Ocean on “some variant of the great north-west line” presented a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the idea of Polynesian voyagers traveling the opposite way. In order to reach the islands of Polynesia, voyagers from the East Indies would have had to sail straight into the teeth of the easterly trades—something no sailing vessel, then or now, is able to do. This led some nineteenth-century theorists to conclude that the inhabitants of Polynesia must have crossed the Pacific in the other direction, starting out in the Americas and traveling west. As one Spanish missionary put it, given the strength and regularity of the prevailing winds, it would have been much “easier to populate all these islands from South America than from any other part of the globe.”

  But while an American point of origin solved the problem of the prevailing winds, it was contradicted by other bodies of evidence. As early as 1775, Cook’s naturalist, Forster, a prodigious linguist, had concluded that there was no connection between the languages of Polynesia and those spoken along the coast of South America, in Chile and Peru. Other observers, coming along a bit later, also noted that the native inhabitants of the Americas were not skilled mariners, and that pigs, dogs, and chickens, all ubiquitous in the Pacific, were unknown in South America, all of which diminished the likelihood of an American starting point.

  Neither the west-to-east nor the east-to-west migration route was thus without its difficulties, leading an English missionary by the name of William Ellis to devise a theory that satisfied the demands of both an Asiatic point of origin and a sea route in keeping with the prevailing winds. According to what we might term the “Beringian solution,” the progenitors of the Polynesian people had begun their migrations on the Asian mainland. From there they had traveled north to the Aleutian Islands, across the Bering Strait, and down along the coasts of California and Mexico before turning back into the Pacific, “under the favouring influence” of the trades. It was a huge circuit of the northern Pacific Rim, tens of thousands of additional miles—hardly the most parsimonious explanation.

  Still another way to think about the great Polynesian diaspora was to account for it not in terms of the movement of people—east to west, west to east, around in a great circle—but in terms of the movement of land. Proponents of this view argued that the islands of the Pacific were the peaks of a drowned continent and that the islanders were the remnants of a population that had survived by clinging to the mountaintops. There was no real evidence for this, though one writer, pointing to the ubiquitous traces of vulcanism—the scoriae, basalt, pumice, and blocks of black glass—that could be found throughout the islands, concluded that the Pacific, that watery waste, must at some earlier time have been an “abode of fire.” Others, however, were less sanguine. As one nineteenth-century skeptic put it, even “supposing a remnant to have escaped, it is scarcely possible that life could be sustained, as usually there is nothing to eat on these lofty mountains, to say nothing of the difficulty of obtaining water.”

  Sunken continents and lost civilizations were popular nineteenth-century solutions to apparently insoluble mysteries (hence “Lemuria,” a lost continent proposed to explain the presence of lemurs on the island of Madagascar). They combined current scientific and philosophical debates about geology and the history of the world (whether change was slow and incremental or proceeded “catastrophically” by fits and starts) with flood myths, echoes of Atlantis and Terra Australis Incognita, and a Romantic enthusiasm for forgotten worlds. But while there have undoubtedly been eruptions, tempests, typhoons, tsunamis, and changes in the level of the sea, there has never been any scientific evidence for the existence of an inhabited lost continent in the Pacific—a fact that has made little or no difference to the enduring popularity of the idea.

  AMONG THE MORE enthusiastic proponents of the drowned-continent theory was a Belgian “merchant adventurer” named Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, who spent a decade or more in Tahiti as a trader and government official in the early nineteenth century. Moerenhout was deeply interested in the Polynesian puzzle. He accepted that the linguistic evidence pointed in the direction of the East Indies, but, like many, he was troubled by the winds. He also rejected the competing American solution, however, on the grounds that there were no linguistic or cultural connections. This left him with only one alternative: Polynesians must have come from where they already were, and since that was in some sense inconceivable, something else must have been there that was now gone: a great continent that had been “suddenly destroyed by the waters of the sea.”

  Central to Moerenhout’s thinking on this subject was his view that Polynesian culture exhibited signs of great antiquity, traces of beauty and sophistication that could be explained only as the echoes of some long-lost civilization. Moerenhout marshaled various bits of evidence in support of this idea—the presence of colossal statues on Easter Island, some obscure but tantalizing fragments of astronomical lore—but his primary proof was a Tahitian cosmogony, or story of the origin of the world, that he himself had collected during a strange and vivid encounter in 1831.

  At the time, Moerenhout was living in a place called Papara, on the south coast of Tahiti. He was friendly with a chief there from whom he had learned something of Tahitian customs. There were things, however, that the chief did not know, and Moerenhout was anxious to find someone who could fill in the gaps in his knowledge. He had
been told about an old priest who was said to know all the ancient traditions, but he had been unable to persuade this man to speak with him or to divulge any of his esoteric lore.

  Then, one night, there was a knock on his door and a voice called out, “Mr. Moerenhout come now!” Opening the door, Moerenhout found a Tahitian messenger, who pulled from beneath his tapa cloth a large banana leaf on which was written a communication from the old priest. It read, “Taaroa was his name; he kept in the void. No land, no sky, no sea, no men. Taaroa called; but nothing responded to him; and existing alone, he was changing in the universe.” Moerenhout described himself as having been “dazzled by this astonishing discovery.” All of a sudden, he wrote, he could see “the veil being raised before my eyes which up to then had hidden the past.” Despite the fact that it was past nine o’clock and pitch dark, he ordered a canoe and set out immediately to visit the old priest.

  It was a wild and exhilarating journey. Because of the location of the old priest’s village, the voyage could not be conducted within the safety of the reef, and the canoe was forced out onto the open ocean. The Tahitians paddled close to the breakers—so near that Moerenhout felt sure the canoe would be dashed to bits on the reef—but the wind was light and the paddlers expert, and the canoe skimmed along through the night. Suddenly, as they came around a bend, the moon rose from behind a peninsula. The peaks of the mountains were drenched in pale silver, the fronds of the coconut palms shivered in the night breeze. Overcome by the vision before him, Moerenhout gave vent to his feelings:

  In the state of mind which I then was, what I was about to learn of the traditions of these islanders, the object of this nocturnal excursion, the spectacle which was surrounding me, this so very tranquil night, this so beautiful place, so singular, these Indians isolated in the middle of the most vast seas; so many diverse objects presented themselves at the same time to my mind, and the confusion of my thoughts making me forget where I was I cried out with force: “Ah! If I am going to learn finally where all this owes its origin!”